Monday, November 14, 2016

I woke up on the morning of the 9th, anxious. A weird sensation
coursed through me whole; an unease which I couldn't shake. I reached for my
phone to see what havoc the night had wrought, and learned that Donald Trump
was leading Hillary Clinton in all the projections news portals were
casting/constantly revising in real-time. Not by much, initially, but leading
he was. Even as we read the numbers coming in, no one wanted to believe what they
seemed to be saying. This couldn't possibly be. Trump might have the lead on
Clinton, but surely it would dissipate soon? Surely, when it came to it, people
were going to vote for the admittedly uninspiring status-quoist who embodied
the establishment they had declaimed loudly - and repeatedly - they despised,
right? Because what real option did they have? A misogynistic and racist sociopath
whose candidacy almost everyone had failed to counter seriously because they
had dismissed it as a joke? Surely voters were going to go with the known evil;
the warmonger over the loose cannon?

Some of you may have deduced from my tone that I'm not
exactly an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter. Well done. I'm not. Let me
spell out why. I identify as feminist: to my core. This has been the one
constant non-negotiable tenet of faith around which all my experiments with
truth, identity, sexuality - being, in a word - have long unfolded. It angered
me endlessly that sections of the media held that not getting behind Clinton's
candidacy somehow 'dented' anyone's feminist credentials. Er. No. Because it is
precisely feminism that does not allow me to look away from the right royal mess
and godawful loss of life in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and anywhere else the US has persisted
in pushing its pathetically self-serving (neo-imperialist) foreign policy. Then
there's the painful fact that even if we recognise that capital is nameless and
faceless, if you squint a little bit, it begins to look a little like the
Clinton Foundation and others of its ilk. Paid speeches to the goons on Wall
Street? It's hard to curry favour with the 99% after something like that, think
you not?

And this is why calling this election has been so bloody
complicated: there is clearly a serious amount of misogyny powering how these
results have panned out. For anyone looking, this much is clear from even
continents away: there was no way America was about to vote a woman into power.
But this wasn't just any woman: this was a woman who was an adept player of the
'game' that animates Washington DC. This was a woman who had an 'emic' or
insider's perspective when it came to the workings of power and the close nexus
between politics and capital.

Were the Democratic party less invested in
maintaining status quo itself, it would have known that fielding Clinton - and
pushing her candidacy over Sanders in as obviously partisan a way as they did -
was a terrible idea. The call that had gone out was a loud and clear one: the
people had made it known that it was 'change' they were after: enough of the
establishment, and whoever they thought embodied it. This is why, as I've been
saying all year through, Trump and Sanders needed to be read, at least structurally,
as companion pieces; alike in more ways than we countenanced. Whether they were
or not (for I hold that Trump is the farthest thing from anti-establishment in
one sense; more on that soon), they were both perceived as outsiders who would
mount a challenge to the power structures that exert and perpetuate hegemony.

I remember being astounded by the numbers Sanders' rallies
were drawing nation-wide when I was in America over the summer. So many people
I spoke to were convinced he was the 'change' candidate America needed. What
struck me then was how, much like with Corbyn in the UK, sections of the media attempted
to malign Sanders by making out that he leaned far Left. How ludicrous a world
do we have to live in for this to be considered an insult? More, how far Right
of Centre has political discourse shifted when a Social Democrat, to most ears,
begins to sound like someone on the Radical Left?

And this is where, in the end, the
beginning: Trump and his wealth are products of the same structures of inequity
and foul-play that people say they want no more of, without being able to name precisely
what it is that ails us. We are living through the death-throes of capitalism. We
saw this with Brexit, and I said then that this was a very scary moment to live
through because world over, people are increasingly frustrated with the
smallness of their lives; of what they imagine it is possible to do with them.
There is angst, there is frustration which often plays itself out in myriad
forms of violence. In India, our response was to elect a fascist strongman who
promised "development" at all cost. In England, the Leave campaign leveraged
just the right amount of paranoia and hatred of the 'other' to carry the day.
This is what Trump has managed to tap into, because discontent - especially the
kind we cannot adequately name or identify the source or shape of - is an
engraved invitation to the strongman (and it has, almost unflinchingly always
been a 'man') to seize the reins of a flailing polity. Modi did it by saying he
had a 56" chest that he would use to protect India from whatever was
coming at us. The irony of a man who has benefitted from (and continues to be a
supporter of) free markets suddenly tapping into a protectionist and hypernationalist
discourse as he plays up the insularity which has long been a hallmark of
large parts of America cannot and should not be lost upon us. There's a Chinese
benediction which goes something like this: may you live in uninteresting times. Clearly,
these are not those times.